


They paved paradise (and put up a parking lot)

by Lothiriel84



Category: The Bunker (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, I Don't Even Know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24075883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lothiriel84/pseuds/Lothiriel84
Summary: If this is paradiseI wish I had a lawnmower
Kudos: 1





	They paved paradise (and put up a parking lot)

For a long time after the Big Headache, he dreams of flowers, and trees, and bees buzzing among green grass. The last time he saw a real plant was in a showcase at the Natural History Museum, and that was decades ago – long before the world as they knew it collapsed, as it had always been bound to.

In his dreams, there is always sunlight playing among paper-thin leaves, the branches swaying gently in the breeze; it’s greener than in any of the movies he’s ever seen, and for all that he keeps peering through the foliage, he cannot seem to spot the sky, nor the occasional cloud passing above. He doesn’t know the name of any of those trees, but he greets them one by one, tapping his fingers lightly against their bark as if they were old friends. He thinks he recognises some of the flowers from pictures he’s seen, but the names are lost to him, and somehow, he knows they do not mind.

They seem to tilt their quivering heads at him, curiously, as if he’s the one incongruous object in this idyllic landscape, and they’re letting him be, for a while.

There’s a pond in the middle of this dreamed park – he knows there used to be parks all around London, a long time ago, before they were replaced with more skyscrapers and roads and shopping malls. Whichever path he chooses to follow, it invariably leads him to its grassy banks – and that’s when the slumbering sense of dread materialises out of nowhere, its tendrils slowly reaching out to him like creeping vines.

That’s not what real water looks like, he thinks. A thin layer of glass separating them from the abyss, that’s what it is – whether above or below, he cannot tell. Should he steel himself and look into the pond, that’s when the illusion would shatter to pieces at his feet.

He doesn’t want to see there is no sky reflected on the pond’s surface – no blue expanse covering them up like a benevolent curtain, separating them from the vastness of space above. No air, nor clouds, just the endless emptiness punctuated with cruel, indifferent stars.

He shudders, closes his eyes, and wills himself awake, the grey, stained walls of the bunker a welcome respite from his nocturnal wanderings. _That was just a dream_ , he mutters to the room at large, the ceiling resting solid and familiar as a shield above his head.


End file.
